The Confession
by SnappyPatter
Summary: Elliot and Olivia experience a unique confession


Disclaimer: The truth is in here.

Elliot parked his blue police sedan on the curb in front of the abandoned warehouse. He rubbed his eyes to clear the blurriness that arose from the sudden lack of motion. After driving through upstate New York for three hours, the anticlimactic arrival seemed…disappointing. Turning to Olivia, yawning and stretching in the passenger seat, he asked, "Are you sure this is the right address?"

His partner grabbed the warrant off the dashboard and glanced at the blue coversheet. "Yeah, an abandoned warehouse at One Abandoned Warehouse Street. It does seem awfully convenient, huh?"

"Awful is about right," Elliot replied.

Getting out of their car, the two detectives surveyed the property – broken windows, boarded up doors, pigeons flying in and out of the rafters. It certainly fit the profile of a den of evil and corruption.

Elliot caressed the butt of his gun, unclipping the strap that kept it secure. He wanted to be able to draw it quickly should the occasion arise. He suddenly realized that he had no idea what kind of arrest they had been sent to make. "Uh, Liv? Who are we here to pick up?"

Olivia blinked, as if someone had just shone a bright light in her eyes. "I have no idea. Why didn't we read the warrant? We were in the car for almost three hours." She unfolded the paper and said, "We're looking for an unnamed individual, wanted for libel and crimes against the English language." She looked at Elliot, her nose scrunched up like she'd caught the scent of something terrible. "These aren't even related to our unit. What the hell is going on here?"

Elliot stared at the ground, trying to remember the conversation they'd had with the Captain just before he'd sent them on their way. "He said that we were going to take!it!personal! and he wanted us to be the ones to deal with it," he mumbled to himself, shrugging.

"He thinks we're going to take it personally, so he sends us to an abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere with no backup to serve an arrest warrant that has nothing to do with sex crimes?"

Elliot was in full agreement with his partner's assessment and took his cell phone out of his pocket. "No service. Damn it." Pulling his gun from its holster. "All right, we came all the way up here. Maybe we should just take a look inside the warehouse, see if anyone's there, then come back with some of the local deputies or something tomorrow."

As he turned, he was surprised to see Olivia on the verge of tears and shaking like a leaf. In a quivering voice, she said, "Oh, Elliot, I'm so afraid. Hold me!"

His jaw dropped. He could barely manage to respond with an eloquent, "Huh?"

Olivia felt a strange sensation, as if she were being wrapped in a smothering fog. She shut her eyes tightly and waved her arms around her head, trying to clear the air. When her breathing became less thick, she opened her eyes to Elliot's blank stare. "What?"

He spoke with a certain measure of embarrassment. "You just said you were scared. And you wanted me to, uh, hold you."

She laughed in spite of the strange feeling that had settled over her, brushing off the shared discomfort. "Fine, don't tell me. Let's check in there and get this over with," she said, pointing to some loose boards covering the door of the warehouse.

The warehouse was surprisingly well-lit. "How do they have power out here?" Elliot wondered out loud.

"More importantly," Olivia replied, "why is there a stream indoors?" Elliot couldn't see why this fact would actually _be_ more important, but there was indeed a small brook running through the building, complete with lily pads, goldfish and a little bridge.

Elliot picked a flower from the edge of the brook and offered it to Olivia.

"Oh, Elliot, you're so romantic."

Just before he could sweep her into his strong, manly embrace and kiss her as he'd been longing to do since the day they met, a voice interrupted. "Ugh. If I were diabetic the saccharine in this room would kill me."

Elliot and Olivia immediately recalled themselves and stepped awkwardly away from each other as an odd creature crawled out from under the bridge. Drawing his gun, which he could have sworn he'd already drawn outside, Elliot said, "Stay where you are, hands above your head."

"Oh, blah, blah, blah, you're here to arrest me," the creature said in a bored voice. "How about you calm down and point that thing somewhere else, Elliot."

"How do you know my name?"

"I know a lot of things. For example, I know that Catholics can get divorced. I know the difference between 'your' and 'you're.' I know the Muffin Man who lives on Drury Lane. I know…"

"You know anything relevant to why we're here?" Olivia asked, half in an effort to obtain useful information and half in a demand for the damn thing to shut up.

As if sensing her thought, the creature narrowed its eyes. "I know that Captain Cragen sent you."

A chill ran through Olivia's blood, causing tiny ice crystals to form in her alveoli and restricting oxygen flow from her lungs to the rest of her body, which caused a chain reaction involving red blood cells, the pancreas, and some other organs. Or something. In short, she had a brief Aunt Pitty-Pat episode. On recovering from her momentary swoon, she heard the creature replying to a question Elliot must have asked.

"You mean how do I know he's your boss or how do I know his name? I suppose it is a bit of a shock; I've consistently referred to him only as 'the Captain.' I was hoping someone would notice that I didn't seem to know his name, but," it threw up its hands in a gesture of helplessness, "it's not as if one can break cover to point out the jokes the SVUCC and TWoP people miss."

"Who _are_ you?" Olivia demanded weakly, vocal tears shining through her dulcet tones.

"I'm a **Troll**. You know, lives under a bridge, makes life difficult, eats little billy goats? I suppose it's just lucky that you're not a goat, Livvy. You'd be stuck in a threesome with Elliot and Casey. But that's not important right now. What matters is that you're here and we can finally chat."

"We're not here to chat. We're here to arrest you. And don't call me Livvy."

"I'm sorry, do you prefer 'Livvie' with an 'ie' instead of a 'y'? Or perhaps Wittle Wivvi-kins'?"

"Detective Benson will be fine."

"See? Now that's in character! Don't take shit from anyone, especially not him!" The Troll pointed at Elliot accusingly, and Elliot felt a strange urge to yell at Olivia for asking him to talk, despite the fact that she'd done no such thing. At least not in the past five minutes. "Yes, feel the hate _flowing_ through you!" the Troll shouted gleefully.

Elliot shook his head to clear it. "What's going on here?"

"Feeling a little UnStabler, are we? Well, we can counter that with a rush of fatherly affection when you think about your little Stablings."

Images of Maureen, Kathleen, Dickie and, uh, that other one filled Elliot's mind, allowing him to rlaax a bit. "How did you do that?"

"It's a mixture of complete disregard for continuity and total control over you," the Troll replied, nonchalantly picking leaves from its scraggly hair.

Olivia certainly felt out of control. And out of character. Clear marshmallow drops threatened to drop from her sparkling cocoa orbs. "Why are you dong this to us?"

"Eh, I like to think of it as a social experiment. How will folks respond? Will people like the new Elliot and Olivia when I make them make out? Will anyone ever see that Finn is not Fin but Huck Finn in an incredibly bastardized form?"

Olivia tried to focus, but it was difficult to see through all the water that had accumulated in her eyes. "But that doesn't really explain things!"

"Actually, it does. But if you want an easier answer, I did it for the entertainment."

"We are not amused," Elliot stated in a dignified tone.

"And you don't need the royal pronoun." The Troll sighed. "You two obviously don't understand the sheer effort of writing badfic. I suppose that's partially my fault. I am the one who brought you into this poorly-spelled, grammar-free world of gaping plot holes."

"All right, you're gonna have to explain that to us," Olivia said, starting to feel very nervous. Or discombobulated. Or smeckledorfed.

The Troll sighed. "That's such a cliché Casey line. And 'smeckledorfed' is not a word." She paused to think, giving Olivia ample time to…stand around and do absolutely nothing. "Apparently I've pushed you all so far out of character that you've started stealing from underused characters' identities in order to survive."

Olivia tried to keep her cool, but she'd suddenly been seized by an overwhelming urge to kiss Elliot and write about it in her journal with a sparkly gel pen. She shook her head and mumbled, "What the hell…"

The Troll excitedly asked, "Was that the urge to slobber all over Elliot's face? Or perhaps to kill Kathy?"

Elliot turned to his partner in shock. "Why would you want to kill my wife? I know she left me, and yeah, I'm having some issues with it, but…"

"Now, now, Elliot. You're not the type to start babbling on about how things make you feel." The Troll waggled her finger in an annoying preschool-teacher-esque way. "And look…you've caused Olivia's deep chocolate vats to fill to the brim with salty drops of pain."

The detectives shared a look. Elliot grunted, "Huh?"

Sighing again, the Troll said, "You can't ask a question with a grunt. If you could, we'd have pigs questioning everything. Try some proper grammar, won't you dear?"

"What did you just say?" Olivia supplied.

"I was saying that your partner almost made you cry. Emphasis on almost."

"And what did that have to do with anything?" Olivia's grip on her gun tightened. She'd have given almost anything to chatting with a stalker right now.

The Troll didn't seem to notice the detective's increasing tension. "Eh, it's not a story if it doesn't contain one ridiculous image of Olivia's eyes, one obligatory anti-Casey joke, one mangled character name, one…"

"Stop! Just stop!" Olivia emptied her clip from a distance of three feet. A stream of correctly spelled words came pouring out of the gun when the bullets were exhausted.

The unharmed Troll stood in front of her, laughing. "You should see if the A-Team's hiring. Seriously though, you don't have to shoot me. You're here because I've decided to turn myself in and stop writing badfic. Just slap the cuffs on me. You can drive me back to the city to stand trial."

Elliot, slightly taken aback by the sudden capitulation, cuffed the Troll, saying, "Well, uh, thanks for coming peacefully, if not quietly."

"No problem. I don't have a Sssseptember birTHday, so your ADA has nothing on me!" Elliot and Olivia said nothing as they shoved the Troll roughly into the back of their car. "It's not like I didn't warn them about the Casey joke…"


End file.
